America Is Hindering AI Development: MIT Professors Warn

Two professors from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)have urged President Donald Trump to remove barriers blocking foreign talent from arriving in the United States and invest more in new cutting-edge technologies, such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning.

The United States is currently the leader in AI development, but it might soon lag behind other countries if the government does not change its immigration policy, the professors, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, warned in a TV interview with Yahoo at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

The MIT professors said that they are finding the administration starving the tech industry of talent.

“When the world’s most intelligent, ambitious, and tenacious people in this field want to come to America to build their lives and careers and we put this Kafka-esque barriers in their place…,” McAfee said.

“If you really wanted to handicap America you’d cut funding in basic research in these fundamental disciplines, cutting off this supply of amazing talent,” McAfee said concerning President Trump’s policies. “You’d do these things if you were on the other side of this competition.”

The professors said China is investing more heavily in AI than the United States.

According to a report from Bloomberg, the Chinese Academy of Sciences tops the list of the world’s leading AI research institutes, and 17 of the top 20 universities and public research organizations researching AI are in the Asian country.

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Investing in artificial intelligence is the need of the hour because AI has proved that it has the potential to boost productivity in all economic sectors, making humans more creative than ever.

Narayan Ammachchi

News Editor for Nearshore Americas, Narayan Ammachchi is a career journalist with a decade of experience in politics and international business. He works out of his base in the Indian Silicon City of Bangalore.

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